ABSTRACT
The impending crisis pits advocates of liberalism, affirming the primacy of the right over the good, against communitarians, upholding the priority of commonly shared ends embodied in an historically given community. Alan Brudner offers an escape from this impasse in The Unity of the Common Law: Studies in Hegelian Jurisprudence. Brudner identifies the unifying foundation as dialogic community and claims that it provides the basis of legality enabling the common law to retain coherence and reconcile the formal right of person and property with the welfare considerations of the common good. Brudner introduces a complementary ambiguity in how he describes the second pole of the common law, where concerns of welfare and the good allegedly challenge the abstract limit of formal right. The common law allegedly achieves coherent unification by individuals recognizing the welfarist claims of the common good in exchange for recognition by the community of their formal right.
